Stephan Lesher: The populist Pope

Stephan Lesher

Published 4:43 pm, Tuesday, January 7, 2014

In his nine months as Pope, Pope Francis, the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, has made it clear that he will not shy away from taking on difficult and controversial issues.

He has surprised many Catholics as well as people in general with his humble demeanor and his relatively gentle language on issues such as homosexuality and divorce and his laser-like focus on the poor.

In mid-December, he provoked additional broad controversy with his first papal exhortation entitled, "Joy of the Gospel." A papal exhortation ranks below formal encyclicals but above regular letters to the faithful.

The 223-page statement is primarily about the meaning of the Gospels, the challenges facing Roman Catholicism and the need for a renewed missionary impulse in the Church.

But he ranged beyond traditional pastoral issues into poverty and inequality and economic matters generally.

This part of the exhortation runs to about 20 pages and seems to support the controversial concepts of liberation theology that emerged in the church out in large part by Francis's -- especially in parts of Latin America -- in the 1960s and 1970s and was largely stamped out by Francis's predecessor, then Cardinal Ratzinger.

While eschewing the task of offering "a detailed and complete analysis of contemporary reality," the Pope warned of the "grave responsibility" to maintain an ever watchful scrutiny of certain present realities that unless effectively dealt with, are capable of setting off processes of dehumanization which would then be hard to reverse.

He praised steps being taken to improve people's welfare in areas such as healthcare, education, and communications. At the same time, he added, "we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day with dire consequences.

"Just as the commandment `Thou shalt not kill' sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we have to say `Thou shalt not' to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills."

Francis stresses the themes of exclusion and inequality and points out that these realities can, and do, in fact, kill people.

The Pope doesn't challenge the fact that capitalism is both productive and generates wealth, but he argues that market expansion is based on exclusion and suffering of people who are powerless.

"In this context, some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness of the world.

"This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting," he wrote.

Francis argued that the poor are not the only victims but that "to sustain the lifestyle which excludes others or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed.

"Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own.

"The culture of prosperity deadens us... In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us. While the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few... A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual which relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules... The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits.

"In this system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which becomes the only rule."

Almost immediately, Rush Limbaugh dismissed the exhortation as "pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Pope."

But quite unlike Marx, the Pope's sharp criticisms were theological rather than economic.

He refers to the idolatry of money behind which attitude "lurks rejection of ethics and a rejection of God."

Ethics, Francis says, "is seen as counterproductive, too human, because... ethics leads to a God who calls for a committed response which is outside the categories of the marketplace."

This powerful, moving document closes with a call for "the return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favors human beings."

This is a Pope who has, and apparently will, continue to confront any and all important moral questions with force, intelligence, and without fear of criticism.